I have taken my passion for the short story and adapted some of America’s greatest contemporary short story writers in these readers theatre evenings. These Readers Theatre Scripts can be performed with the entire cast “on book” and staged very simply with “music stands” as podiums or done like a play with more complex staging and everyone having lines memorized playing full-blown characters. The scripts will come to you in a more formalized “Readers Theatre” style with simple blocking requiring no set except stools and music stands. I can assure you audiences have thoroughly enjoyed discovering these short story writers in this wonderful format. The fee includes scripts for cast, crew and director as well as the royalty for the writer. Ol’ Black Bear Press will make all the arrangements with the authors and give you a quote based on the number of performances, the size of your theatre and your admission charge.

Perry T. Schwartz

Perry T. Schwartz is available for workshops to help develop your production or in certain circumstances with advance booking, will direct a production for you. Inquiries are welcome.

Readers Theatre Scripts

Manuscript Reading Scripts of Readers Theatre
available @ $25.00 each

SMOKE AND MIRRORS by Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman takes these stories from the wonderful collection of the same name. They have the same fantasy quality of the recent movie Stardust, based on his graphic novel.

Readers Theatre Example

SPEAKING FRENCH IN KANSAS by Robert Day
Mr. Day is the author of novel, The Last Cattle Drive. He is from Kansas and writes of its people with great passion and humor. His stories are a joy to read and to see on stage.

GO THE DISTANCE,Stories About Baseball and Life
by W. P. Kinsella
Mr. Kinsella is one of Canada’s best know authors with over twenty-one published books of short stories and novels. He is probably best known as the author of Shoeless Joe Jackson on which the film Field of Dreams was based. His sense of character and fantasy come to life in these stories of baseball, one of his greatest loves.

DREAM ON AND OTHER STORIES by Janet Kaufman
Ms. Kaufman takes us into her world, which is filled with lovely, interesting, funny characters who sometimes exist in a real and fantasy world at the same time. These stories are taken from three of her collections, “Place in the World a Woman Can Walk,” “Characters on the Lose,” and “Obscene Gestures for Women.”

BORROWED HEARTS by Rich Demarinis
These stories are taken from four collections of short stories by Mr. Demarinis. He creates wonderful characters that can touch the heart of any audience in situations that we can all understand and with which we can sympathize.

THE MAN WHO KNEW BELLE STARR AND OTHER STORIES
by Richard Bausch
Mr. Bausch is one of America’s most respected writers of short stories and is often compared to Raymond Carver. His stories deal with ordinary human beings and how we solve simple problems with meaning and love. To read his stories is to understand how funny and fragile we humans are.

THE HEAVEN OF ANIMALS AND OTHER STORIES
by Alison Baker
Ms Baker’s stories are quirky and unpredictable but completely engaging. We come to love her characters and her flights of fancy into imaginary worlds into which real people sometimes wander.

FISHING by Perry T. Schwartz adapted from “The Story I’m Writing” by Robert Day

Fishing is a hybrid between readers theatre and a standard stage play. It is a story of a great friendship, narrated by the main character as other actors play out his life with a best friend who has recently died. It is funny, irreverent, and touching. This play requires a fairly high degree of multi-media production, including video, live camera and slides.